Knit 1 Purl 1
by Crinklybrownleaves
Summary: A story about knitting, love, family and sadness. And the person who stitches them all together.
**Ah yes, knitting. You might think it's a strange thing to write a story about. Well, in truth, this story is not just about knitting, it's about what making things means. Knitting is above all else about the people you are creating stuff for - family, friends, yourself, even strangers if you are into yarn bombing (which I'm not).**

 **Watching the episode (Smoke and Mirrors) in which knitting features, it is clear to me that Nadine Garner is not as good a knitter as Jean is, but I can forgive her that because she has so many other talents! And she gives it a good go!**

 **This story is set in the (near) future, in a world in which Jean is married to Lucien.**

 **Let me know what you think of the story, and I promise not to write about knitting again. Well, not too soon, anyway.**

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"Sometimes knitting's best done while thinking about something else, or talking about something else." S2 E4.

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After dinner, Jean disappeared into the dining room and left Lucien with his whisky. He closed his eyes and relaxed, swirling the whisky round in the glass and breathing in its powerful aroma. For a while he was happy enough with his own company, but then he began to wonder what Jean was doing.

He missed her, even though they had spent most of the day together anyway. He looked forward to their evenings together, just reading or talking, or sometimes Jean would get out her sewing or knitting. So what was she up to in there by herself?

He made some tea and pushed the dining room door open with the edge of the tray. The table was covered randomly in many knitted squares, all sorts of colours, and Jean had her back to him as she stood looking at them, with her head on one side.

She turned to him then. "Tea, oh, that's lovely. Could you give me a hand with this?"

"Of course, but what are you doing, Jean?" he replied, setting the tray down on a chair.

"Making a blanket, but the problem is knowing where to put all the squares, before I sew them together. It's not just that I want to put the right colours together though; most of the squares have their own stories, and I want to put them in the right places."

She seemed to think this was a perfectly normal way to talk about knitting, but Lucien was looking at her rather strangely.

"Stories?" he asked, tentatively. "Perhaps you'd better tell me more about that idea." They both moved nearer the table and Lucien looked more closely at the squares. From a distance they had all looked much the same, all about six inches square, just in a wide variety of colours, but now he could see there was more to it than that.

Jean started to explain.

"I've been knitting these for years. Every time I've knitted a jumper or a hat, or something else, I've knitted a square or two with the leftover wool. For example, these are made out of the wool I had left after I knitted the shawl for Amelia." She pointed to a couple of squares made of very soft white baby wool.

"And that blue one is from some wool I used to make Danny some gloves." She turned to Lucien again, and he nodded, beginning to understand what this was all about.

"Well, maybe you should put them into groups and tell me the stories, and then it might all come together." He drank some of his tea and pointed to a rather felted looking green square. "What about that one?"

She touched it gently and smiled. "That one used to be a jumper that I knitted for Christopher before the war. After he died I didn't want to just throw it away so I eventually unravelled it and knitted some squares. There are some more somewhere."

Jean looked in a box under the table and Lucien realised there were a lot more than he had thought. She pulled out some more and, without commenting, she sorted all the squares into several piles.

Lucien watched her, and when she stepped back he said, "So, those are Amelia's, and Danny's, and Christopher's," pointing at the ones he now recognised. "Tell me about these, Jean." He indicated a large pile of squares, of many different colours, and now he looked more closely, of many different patterns and stitches too.

"Right, well, those were the ones I knitted when your father was ill. He just wanted me to sit with him most of the time, and I spent hours knitting, trying out cables, and feather and fan, and lace and mitres, all sorts of things."

Lucien tried to look as though he knew what they were, and failed. Jean smiled at him.

"It was a surprisingly happy time," she said. "I read to him a lot, and he told me lots of stories about your mother, and about you when you were a boy. And I knitted while he talked or slept."

Lucien looked at those squares with renewed interest. They held something of his father, at least in Jean's memory. He realised Jean had known and understood his father better than he ever had, and the things she knew about him were bound up in those intricate patterns she had created.

Jean broke the silence that had settled on them by pointing out two rather badly knitted squares. "Mattie knitted those; I think it was harder than she expected, but I definitely want to include them."

They continued to sort through the squares, putting them in groups - Jean's family in one corner, the lodgers' squares in another, plus several that Lucien recognised from items Jean had made him - and with the many squares for Lucien's father round the edge as a border.

In the box there were just a few left. Lucien pulled out some that seemed stiff and densely knitted, looking rather odd to him. Jean looked uncomfortable and took them from him, going to put them back in the box. "What's the matter with those?" he asked gently.

Not meeting his eye, she explained. "I made those in the weeks after Mei Lin came here. I needed something to do, to keep me busy. I spent quite a few nights knitting rather than sleeping!" She laughed rather humourlessly. "Seeing them now, I think I must have been rather tense. Look how tightly knitted they are!"

Lucien put his arms round her and hugged her, squashing the squares between them. "Shall we leave them out, then?" But she shook her head.

"No, they're a part of our story so they deserve a place. Not right in the middle though." And she put them to one side.

While Jean finished drinking her tea, she moved squares around in their groups, getting the colours balanced and tidying them up.

At last there was only one multi coloured square left in the box. Lucien took it out and looked at it curiously. It didn't even look like knitting to him. He looked enquiringly at Jean and she reached out for it.

"That was my one attempt at crochet," she said. "I never did get the hang of it. It's called a granny square." Her gaze defied him to make the obvious comment and he resisted, so eventually she said it herself.

"Alright, that one is me; I'm the grandmother I suppose."

Lucien took the square and made space for it in the middle, where she belonged, at the centre of all their lives, and he turned to kiss her. "You're the loveliest granny I know, anyway. And you are right, this blanket does tell a story, and it's all about you and the people you love."

And she took his hand in hers and smiled.


End file.
